The Israelites dance around the golden calf, while Moses on the mountain receives the ten commandments of God. Photo: IMAGO/piemags via Reuters Connect

Writing for the Denver Post in 1896 about Mark Hanna — President William McKinley’s version of Elon Musk — the American writer Alfred Henry Lewis wryly noted that “the only barrier between us and anarchy is the last nine meals we’ve had.”

It’s a sobering thought. Three days without food and all our carefully cultivated civility — laws, social norms, polite lines at the coffee shop — vanish in a second. We all like to think that society is safely held together by some higher moral order — but time and again, history suggests otherwise.

The unspoken contract — that the lights will turn on with a flick of a switch, that garbage will disappear from the curb like clockwork, and that your local bodega won’t suddenly go up in flames — is far more fragile than we’d like to believe.

And if one city has learned this lesson, it’s New York. Not once, but twice. Once when the city drowned in its own garbage, and once when it was plunged into darkness. Each time, a sudden vacuum in the most mundane, taken-for-granted systems led to utter chaos.

The first time it happened was in 1968. New York’s sanitation workers had been without a contract for six months, locked in a stalemate with Mayor John Lindsay. In February, fed up with his latest offer, they walked off the job.

Garbage collection is one of those invisible functions of civilization, something most people never think about — until it stops. And when 7,000 sanitation workers went on strike, densely packed New York turned into something out of a dystopian novel.

Within days, sidewalks disappeared beneath 100,000 tons of rotting waste. History professor Vincent Cannato describes the Lower East Side: “Garbage was piled chest-high. Egg shells, coffee grounds, milk cartons, orange rinds, and empty beer cans littered the sidewalk.”

The city reeked like an open sewer, and rats strutted through the streets like they had just been elected to public office. The New York Daily News declared it “a stinking mess,” and for once, no one accused them of exaggeration.

New Yorkers, never ones to suffer in silence, found ways to cope. Some reportedly joked about selling chunks of trash heaps to foreign tourists as “authentic New York artifacts.” Others, running out of options or patience, took a more direct approach: they loaded up their garbage and dumped it on the mayor’s front lawn.

It took nine days for the city to cave and meet the workers’ demands. Nine days to realize that the people they had ignored — perhaps even forgotten — were the only thing standing between New York and a full-blown landfill apocalypse. Order was eventually restored, the streets were cleaned, and life moved on. But not before the city got a front-row seat to just how fast civilization can unravel when an essential system collapses.

Fast forward to 1977. This time, it wasn’t garbage collection but electricity that disappeared, and the consequences were even worse. At exactly 8:37 pm on July 13, a lightning strike knocked out power to the entire city. Not just a block or two, not just a borough — the whole thing.

New York had been through blackouts before, but this one was different. In the famous 1965 blackout, people had stayed calm, waiting patiently for the lights to return. Strangers helped each other across darkened streets, shared flashlights, and even turned the ordeal into an impromptu street festival.

But 1977 was another story. It was a sweltering summer, crime was already at an all-time high, and the city was teetering on the edge. When the power cut out this time, there were no candlelit singalongs — just total chaos.

Entire city blocks turned into war zones. More than 1,600 stores were looted. Hundreds of buildings were set on fire. Brooklyn alone lost half its sneaker supply overnight, while in Manhattan, electronics stores were wiped clean, with looters hauling away televisions even though there was no electricity to turn them on.

When the lights finally flickered back on the following day, New York looked like it had been hit by an earthquake and a tornado combined. Because, as Alfred Henry Lewis might have put it, the only thing standing between civilization and anarchy is a working power grid.

Which brings us to Parshat Ki Tissa. The Israelites, fresh out of Egypt and still adjusting to the whole concept of freedom, had their own infrastructure crisis. They had Moses — reliable, steady Moses. Their leader, their guide, their direct line to God. And then, suddenly, he was gone — delayed on Mount Sinai longer than expected. Maybe he wasn’t coming back at all.

His absence created a vacuum, and in a panic, they did what people in crisis always do: improvise. If they couldn’t have Moses, they’d make a replacement. Enter the Golden Calf — a glittering idol stand-in for leadership. Chaos erupted, and by the time Moses returned, the damage was done. The lesson was painfully clear: remove a stabilizing force, and all bets are off.

The tragedy of the golden calf — and more recently, of the garbage strike and the blackout — is that none of it had to happen. Had the Israelites waited just a little longer, had New Yorkers been just a little more patient, disaster could have been avoided.

But people don’t handle vacuums well. When leadership disappears, systems break down, and the fundamental structures of daily life suddenly vanish. What replaces it is often unsavory or worse.

The real test of a society isn’t how it functions when everything is running smoothly. It’s what happens when something — be it a leader, a service, or even just the streetlights — suddenly isn’t there. Do people hold steady, trust that order will be restored, and keep their equilibrium? Or do they spiral, letting fear and uncertainty consume them? History, unfortunately, suggests that the latter is far more likely.

Moses’ return, much like the end of the blackout or the arrival of the garbage collectors, came too late to undo the damage. The people had already revealed their true selves. And while the immediate crisis was resolved — Moses shattered the idol, the worst offenders were punished — the deeper question remained: why does it take losing something to realize how much it mattered?

The story of the golden calf has shaped Jewish civilization for millennia — precisely because it warns us what happens when a vacuum is allowed to fester. That’s why it’s in the Torah — to remind us, year after year, that the barrier between civilization and anarchy is thinner than we imagine. And it’s up to us to keep it from breaking down.